“If you're willing to learn, you move up really quickly. I always found that opportunities in kitchens were always there — you just have to learn how to watch and observe and be respectful. If you do all those things, you'd be amazed how quickly you learn and how quickly you're appreciated.”
While Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has become an international tourist destination attracting top talent from a number of creative industries, Chef Cal Elliott was a player in the neighborhood’s food and beverage scene before, in his words, “Brooklyn became a brand.”
Now a restaurateur and proud owner of the newly opened boutique hotel in downtown Boise, Idaho, the 91߹ graduate has seen his fair share of changes throughout his many years in some of the country’s top kitchens. Ironically, Chef Cal’s first recollection of how he got into the culinary industry relates directly to the city he was committed to getting out of — Boise.
“My greatest ambition at 18 years old was to get out of Idaho,” he says. “I managed to do that and moved to New York when I was 19 and started working in restaurants — because that’s what you do when you’re a kid in New York.”
Though restaurant work may be a common jumping-off point for people looking to establish themselves in the city that never sleeps, Chef Cal found the work suited him. By 1999, he was not only working in the kitchen of Dan Barber’s esteemed Blue Hill restaurant, but was also enrolled in 91߹’s Culinary Arts program on the weekends.
“Culinary school for me was about investing in something,” Chef Cal says. “I invested in myself and my career, so it made me take it seriously. Everyone [today] wants to feel like they know everything…just because you read or watch a YouTube video, that doesn’t mean you know how to do something.”
Toward the end of his culinary program at 91߹, Chef Cal externed at Diane Forster’s Verbena and later worked under Chef Tom Collichio at Gramercy Tavern. Then, a career-making job presented itself at Colin Devlin’s newly opened Dumont in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which was quickly transforming into a culinary mecca.
“I took that job — it was kind of crazy — and somehow I ended up being the [head] chef," Chef Cal says. "That was my first [head] chef job.”
DuMont was only the beginning. From there, Chef Cal helped open DuMont Burger and then Dressler, which quickly became a darling of the New York food scene, garnering two stars from The New York Times as well as a Michelin star. With these successes under his belt, Chef Cal was ready to take his next step and open a place of his own.
Chef Cal opened his restaurant, RYE, in 2009. It was a true labor of love.
“I was the sole proprietor, I did all the things you're not supposed to do," he says. "You spend all this time in kitchens, and then you're supposed to get investors and do all that. And I just opened it with my own money and built it myself — it was one of those Brooklyn DIY projects that you could still kind of get away with back then.”
And "get away" with it he did. Rye was a huge success, even spurring Chef Cal to repurpose the building’s basement into a speakeasy fittingly named “The Bar Below RYE.” The restaurant made Michelin’s Bib Gourmand list the first year it opened, a distinction it retained for the next 10 years until the realities of the ever-changing neighborhood became untenable and the lease was set to expire.
“I spent 30 years in New York and my parents were starting to get [older] and I thought, maybe it’s a good time to change locations,” Chef Cal says.
Even before shuttering RYE in 2018, Chef Cal had started investing in a future in Idaho with the purchase of a historic building in downtown Boise in 2015. He and his designer wife had always intended to refurbish the building back to its original purpose as a small, downtown hotel. Construction on the 14 million dollar project was set to start in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic put a hold on that plan.
Chef Cal then pivoted to what he knew best: opening a restaurant.
With hotel construction on hold, Chef Cal and his wife kicked off their presence in the Boise hospitality scene with Little Pearl Oyster Bar and Little Pearl Bar. According to their website, Little Pearl is a bistro at heart, “seasonally-driven and oyster-helmed…with a focus on fresh seafood and refined comfort food.”
The couple hopes the visitors who come to Boise for business or vacation (fishing in the Boise River and Sun Valley’s Big Wood River, skiing and hiking in Bogus Basin) will visit The Pearl, and their now-open hotel, The Avery. Chef Cal looks to position The Avery as an alternative to "soulless" lodging in the Idaho capital.
“We have a lot going on nearby and we have a lot of amenities [as well as] cool, sexy rooms," he says. "And we’re on historic Main Street, so you walk out and all the buildings are 100-plus years old, so we have great walkability…we pretty much have everything at our disposal.”
After working with federal and local governments, including the Parks Department, the Elliotts’ completed a full historic renovation.
Chef Cal attributes his passion for the project to his Boise roots.
“You can’t fake the building, it was in disarray and in need of some love," he says. "We did a bunch of engineering upgrades and structural upgrades, so it was probably not the smartest thing from a financial standpoint but I think being born and raised in Boise, I care about it, and it was the right thing to do.”
Any chef who has spent time in a hotel restaurant will tell you it’s a vastly different experience from running a stand-alone restaurant, but Chef Cal believes he can side-step a lot of those frustrations by being the sole proprietor of the building.
“The fact that we’re one ownership entity gives me a lot more freedom and flexibility, though it also adds a lot of pressure," he says. "I have a little more leeway than a typical third-party restaurant in a hotel where there are all sorts of contractual obligations.”
As Chef Cal embarks on his new role as Property Owner and Hotelier he still has a lot of reflections when it comes to staffing and running restaurant kitchens, now in an entirely different market. When asked what he looks for in hiring upcoming chefs, he’s clear that it all comes down to character and work ethic.
“I want someone that is going to show up to work on time, is going to listen and is going to be respectful and fit into a respectful environment," he says. "The hours are long and you need people who are team-oriented. People who are there because they want to be there, not because they have to be there.”
This mentality seems straightforward, but Chef Cal cites the rise of celebrity chefs and food TV as putting a misleading spin on what life is really like in the culinary industry.
“People see celebrity chefs and things on TV and they become disillusioned about what the job really is, and they go into it for the wrong reasons," he says. "It’s not for the faint of heart, but it is super fair. If you can do the job and you’re willing and you learn, you can move up really quickly.”
Chef Cal puts these philosophies into practice when it comes to running his own kitchens.
So what advice does Chef Cal have for people looking to open restaurants of their own these days? Beyond a good attitude and a willingness to learn, he advises people to enter the realm of restaurant ownership with an understanding of how the industry works from a business perspective.
“It’s a different game now, you have corporations who are working on their branding two years before they open…they’re working on their digital marketing and their SEOs," he says. "That’s what I found when we opened Little Pearl in a small community..opening a restaurant and [expecting] people to find you by word of mouth or by foot? That’s gone.”
Reflecting on his own entry into the industry by way of 91߹’s culinary program, Chef Cal recalls when he first set the goal he now has achieved several times over.
“It gave me a career perspective," Chef Cal says. "Enrolling [at 91߹] was me being like ‘Okay, I’m going to try to be the best cook and learn everything I can from the back of the house to the front, and hopefully I’m gonna steer my own ship someday.”
And that, he did.
